Whether you are starting a new relationship and moving in together for the first time, have bought a new place that needs transformation or feel it is just time to redecorate your pad, successfully decorating your shared space is vital. These tips will help you find a balance between your tastes, creating an environment that highlights and complements your combined style.

1. Before you start, discuss together what you want to achieve and create a mood board.

Stop! Before you do anything and especially before you rush out to the interior design shop, discuss your ideas for your shared space. One idea is to create a mood board where you cut out images, place fabric swatches and colour chips to see what a potential design may look like. You may feel that creating one may be over the top but it can help you visualise and share ideas. (Think of it as a shared craft exercise!) Grab those magazines, don’t forget, you can get inspiration not only from the glossy pages of interior magazines and do it yourself specials, but also fashion and food magazines. If this doesn’t inspire your partner you will find that even car magazines can provide inspiration with beautiful colours, tones and shades which will inspire your shared colour sense when you are decorating.

2. Select your colour palette for decorating perfection.

Decide on a colour palette ensuring it is not too masculine or feminine to ensure there is harmony within your home, it ensures a room is not just for one partner. Step away from those obvious pinks and blues, leave ‘stereotyping’ a room colour for the nursery or children’s bedrooms.

Think of colour temperatures that complement each room. If a room is blessed with being sunny from dawn until dusk, think cooler shades such as teals, greys or lilacs. If you want some warmth in your boudoir, head towards the reds, golds and purples. Get to your home improvement store and look at the variety of interior paints, make sure you pick up some sample pots to test colours in your rooms.

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3. Consider how you live your life.

What is central to your life? Is TV important to you or do you enjoy a roaring fire? Look to encompass how you will use your space and build your design around this. If you love to entertain, consider a large dining table where you can share dinner parties with friends. If you love sports or movies on the big screen you can create a comfortable viewing area for you to relax together. It’s all about how you spend your time and ensuring your interior suits this.

4. Use special items as inspiration.

Have you got one treasured item that you both love? It could be a particular vase, a picture frame which contains your favourite photograph, your favourite armchair or even something as silly as that cuddly animal toy you both bought at the zoo on your first date.

Take these special items as your inspiration for the main colour palette for the central room in your life, where you’ll both be spending time. It will always bring back special memories and gel the rest of the interior.

5. Decide what’s in and what’s out.

You need to take some time to decide what will you keep to be part of the new style and what just ‘has to go’. Do be ruthless – otherwise you will find that you will clutter your new space. Look to find the central, special items that you want to use as your focal points. Just remember, don’t go for broke and get rid of everything!

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You may not be able to get magazine shoot perfection in your interior, remember however that this is your home and not a studio set up for one photograph! You may strive to create just one style; however, you shouldn’t have to. Strike a balance between styles, it may create an eclectic look but it will be your look! It doesn’t matter that you’re dining chairs are all different or that you have differing styles of soft furniture.

6. Give each other space.

Your partner may feel they need their own space, whether it is his ‘man cave’ with the scruffy leather chair that he has had for years or you may want to create a feminine dressing room. If space allows, go for it. Utilize your spare bedroom, basement or even just the corner of a room to give each other your own personal space that you can each call your own.

7. Use soft furnishings to accent and change up your interior.

Don’t forget to use your soft furnishings as accents. Use your duvet cover and pillow cases as quick ways to inject colour and design into your bedroom or cushions on your sofas to provide a contrasting look.

From large prints and embroidery to add impact, strips in blue or red to give a nautical look. You can also use blocks of complementary colours as a way to create a theme. Remember, they are the simplest things to change so if you feel you want a change or style, you can do it with a change of fabrics!

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8. Always remember, compromise is king.

Neither of you will get everything you want in your interior design. It’s a fact of life that there will have to be compromise. So bear this in mind as you plan and decorate. Be ready to deviate from your plan, you will find that you will more likely create a design you can both live with.

9. Use some of the tricks of the trade.

There are numerous ‘tricks of the trade’ used by professional interior designers that you can use to make the most of your own rooms. Some of the most effective ‘quick wins’ are:

Use mirrors to make a space seem bigger. Well-placed mirrors will reflect light and make any room seem more spacious.

Be creative with lighting. Rather than just using overhead lighting, consider using table lamps and other creative lighting features such as LED colour changing lamps, which will allow you to totally change the atmosphere at the touch of a button. You can go from warm white to a cool wash of blue or green, and for party nights a funky disco style!

Pictures let you add interest. Use your wall space with pictures which mean something to both of you. Artwork can add colour and be a focal point for any room. Remember to hang them at eye level to ensure you make the most of them.

10. Make it fun!

Make every part of your interior design a shared activity. Enjoy a glass of wine as you plan and the promise of a nice night out to celebrate when you finish. Remember, even when you have decorated, it is not the end. Your décor and surroundings are a living thing. You can always be on the lookout for something that will ‘just look perfect’! A great interior design is a ‘living thing’.

Once you have your design, here’s how to make it happen!

When you have agreed on your perfect interior design you have the task of putting it all into place. If the thought of hard work makes your quake in fear, here are some pointers to make it more fun for both of you.

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The key to ensuring a room looks fabulous is to make sure you spend the time preparing to decorate. Clear the room entirely (make your life easy by giving yourself the room to work!). Clean walls of old wallpaper thoroughly (an excuse to get steamy with a wallpaper stripper!), carefully sand any woodwork and clean any painted surfaces with Sugar Soap to make sure it is clean and ready for repainting.

Basically it allows you to start with a clean blank canvas. Discuss what each of you will do (one of you might be taller so can reach higher for example, whilst the other takes more time because they like detail, so fine gloss painting would be a great task). Don’t expect just one of you to do all the prep work! You will need to work together to create a perfect room.

Remember, there may be one of you who is more skilled in yielding a paint brush, it might be better than one takes the lead whilst the other supports and becomes the ‘labourer’ (However, for the sake of harmony don’t tell them this!). Don’t feel one of you must do everything. You will each have skills to share and you can make it a fun learning experience.

Decorating is a fun activity that can bring a couple close together in a physical sense, as you share the same space whilst holding a ladder. Don’t forget, it can be great fun getting clean together after a hard day with a paint roller!

7 Morning Rituals to Empower Your Day And Change Your Life

Most of your reality is not a given. It is shaped by your expectations, beliefs and thoughts you have formed about it. A big chunk of these beliefs and expectations are encoded into habits you integrate in your daily life.

Yes, some of these habits are formed unconsciously and can be counter-productive or limiting but conversely, you can consciously form positive habits that will transform and empower your life significantly.

This is a powerful point of departure that more and more people are becoming aware of. The most common trait of highly successful people is the recognition of the power they have in co-creating their reality through changing the way they think, believe or expect their reality to be.

One of the most effective ways of changing our belief patterns is through practising and maintaining daily rituals. Ancient traditions had clearly understood the power of rituals in reinforcing habits and changing the way we see and create our reality a long, long time ago.

Once again, if you look into the life history of any highly successful individual, you will find some form of ritual in their daily routine. Some of these rituals may seem banal or eccentric but don’t be deceived by appearances. Rituals are one of the most effective self-empowering tools freely available at the practitioner’s disposal – that is, you!

Below are some the easiest yet life-changing morning rituals you can do every day. Of course, you can have your own afternoon or bed-time rituals but morning rituals are extremely effective in empowering your day since they help you charge yourself before it all starts.

1. Gratitude

Feeling gratitude and appreciation for those little signs and moments of joy happening in your life is probably one of the most overlooked or underestimated rituals. It is a perfect morning ritual to start your day on a very positive key.

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The real power of gratitude is that it makes you pick out and focus on what is working in your life – what is in tune with your being as a whole. It is selectively positive. It reinforces happiness and positivity by shedding light on those awesome things, small or big, that grace your everyday living.

Quite often, we just pick out the pain points, the problems, the bottle necks, whatever it is that is not working in our life and causing friction, anxiety and unhappiness. This is like constantly rewriting the script of your life with a negative or tragic overtone. Your subconscious mind follows faithfully that script you write whether it is a negative or positive one.

So feeling gratitude is undoubtedly an immensely empowering ritual. Start your day by being thankful for those positive things that happened the previous day or throughout the week. It could be something really petty and small. It doesn’t matter. You might be grateful for an unexpected visit from an old friend, a beautiful encounter with a kind stranger, a new opportunity or whatever it is that shines your way. Do it every morning and see what happens during the day.

2. Writing Down Your Most Important Tasks

This is a very practical ritual. Start your day by identifying and writing down from one to three of the most important tasks you need to complete during that day. These tasks are ones which support important long term goals that are aligned to your purpose, passion or general direction in life.

For example, if writing a book or building an online community are important long term goals which are aligned to your personal growth, then an important task for the day might be finishing off a particular page or two of the book or coming up with fresh content ideas for the online community.

What is important with this ritual is that you identify these tasks and complete them as early in the day as possible. Of course, you will have other tasks apart from the ones you will write down but, these are tasks which can be tackled later or batched up and carried out in one go.

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Writing down your most important tasks in the morning helps you focus your day and life according to what is essential. It helps you prioritize and manage your time better. As a result, you simplify your life by applying your focus and energy on what really counts for your overall life progress.

3. Affirm Your Goals in Writing or Drawing

This is similar to the previous idea but different in its application and purpose. Writing down your most important tasks of the day is a way to have a concrete structure of action to follow. Affirming your goals, on the other hand, is a very powerful way of crystallizing your vision and goals in life into your everyday mental space.

Writing down or doodling your goals on a piece of paper helps you externalize those goals by giving them form. In return, they are reflected back in your subconscious mind and thus, reinforcing them and integrating them more wholly.

An example of this would be writing down “I am achieving greater success in my career” or “I am becoming healthier and stronger through my exercise.” Notice the present tense being used as a way to tell yourself you are in the process already. Remember the life script we subconsciously follow? You are basically modifying the script to be applied now in the present.

Drawing or doodling can be equally, or even more, effective (if you are more of a visual person) as it summarizes a graphical representation of your goals. For example, if your goal is to build a new house or live in another country, you can draw the house or draw things that symbolise the country you want to live in.

4. Practice Qi Gong Exercises

According to Chinese philosophy, Qi (pronounced ‘Chee’) means the life force or energy inherent in all things;[1] and Qi Gong is the practice to cultivate and circulate that energy in your body. This may sound esoteric or complicated but actually, Qi Gong is really a set of simple exercises aimed at increasing your health and vitality.

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There are numerous forms and practices available for free through the online media. As a morning ritual, I recommend following these simple exercises by Qi Gong master Lee Holden:

5. Drink Hot Water with Lemon

Simply add a slice of lemon in a glass of hot water and drink one every morning. This is a very simple ritual I follow faithfully every morning.

Apart from being a good source of vitamin C and a great way of flushing out toxins in the morning, it balances and maintains the PH levels in the body, reduces pain and inflammation in joints and knees and helps nourishing brain and nerve cells. Here are some more benefits of drinking hot water with lemon.

6. Rise Earlier

For example, you gain more time for doing exercise such as walking, cycling or Qi Gong as suggested above. You gain more time to be with yourself to reflect, meditate or, more importantly, carry out the other morning rituals.

So rising early can be seen as a foundation for all the other morning rituals. Many, like myself, find that they are more productive in the early hours of the day.

Also, various studies have shown that there are many other benefits from waking up an hour or two earlier in the morning. Sleeping early and waking up early helps the body attune with the earth’s circadian rhythms thus, promoting more restorative sleep. Other curious results from such studies show, for instance, that early risers tend to be more optimistic and can anticipate and solve problems more efficiently than the norm.[2]

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7. Listen to Uplifting Music

Uplifting music can have a direct impact on our mood, especially in the morning. It charges us emotionally and tunes us into a more positive outlook of the day ahead.

Most people wake up to music or listen to music as they commute to work. Very often, however, they tune in to a radio or randomly pick a playlist from their device. Being more selective and conscious of the music you listen to in the morning can have a great impact on your day and life in general.

It’s funny how we try to choose music according to our mood. For example if you are feeling down or disappointed by something, you are more prone to listen to music that reflects that mood – for instance blues, sad songs or downtempo music. This has the effect of reinforcing that mood. What you need to do is the exact opposite and retune your mood by listening to music that beats to a different tune than that mood.

Try to listen to more uplifting music in the morning even if, or especially if, your mood does not dictate so.